Tragic and hilarious in equal measure, Tim Lott’s story of Charlie and Maureen Buck’s ailing marriage and their climb up (and down) the social ladder during the 1980s is a wonderfully honest portrait of ordinary people living through an extraordinary time. Steeped in the decade’s cataclysmic events, packed with the crimes and misdemeanours we visit on each another, Rumours of a Hurricane is a powerful tale of change, how we face it – and how we don’t.

‘Very clever, very funny. If it fails to win a big prize there is no justice in this world’ 
Ruth Rendell, Sunday Times

‘Subtle, vivid, compassionate. A landmark novel’
Daily Mail

‘Awesome, breathtaking stuff. Tim Lott is one of my all-time favourite writers’ 
Tony Parsons

‘An epic narrative of the Thatcher years and an intimate, almost unbearably moving portrait of a marriage dying a gradual death. So good that this year’s Booker judges are bound to ignore it’ 
Jonathan Coe, Sunday Times

‘A very fine novel encompassing a momentous decade with ease. Lott is one of the most humane, and darkly funny writers we have … an epic tale’ 
Daily Express

3 May 1979 - The truth that confronts us every day in the twenty-first century, that pushes in on our worlds through every crevice and loophole in our lives, is still, in this as yet unacknowledged fulcrum of a year, a kind of secret.

The secret truth is this: that things change. That things are change. And, hard as it is to reimagine, standing where we do on the precipice of an avowedly and perpetually crumbling world, this reality is, at the end of the 1970s, still under the carpet. People are beginning to trip up on it; but looking round, they are still puzzled by the cause of their bruises, their damage. It is a stranger place than you might expect, this remembered country. Recognisable, of course, yet oddly distorted, at odds, for a past so slightly receded.

Inflation, decimalization, the three-day week, industrial chaos, oil-price hikes, Irish terrorists taking their deadly suitcases and shopping bags to the streets and litter bins of England - the age is replete, like all ages are, with weird multiplicities of denial. But contradicting the fact that things happen is the popular embrace of a bigger, more established and comforting fact that things stay the same. The Queen reigns and is loved by all her subjects, with the exception of a few loudmouth punks. England stumbles on, making the best of a bad job. The unions fight with the bosses, and the government, Tory or Labour, steps in to sort things out when the two of them can't manage it themselves. Coffee is instant. Bread is sliced. Weather is rainy. Car, for Charlie Buck, is a plum-coloured 1973 Triumph Toledo with a starter motor that is always jamming.

Charlie, on this particular day, is on strike. Charlie, like his father before him, is a compositor at Times Newspapers. And, like his father before him, Charlie quite routinely finds himself on strike. It is a matter of no great alarm or surprise. Striking is much bemoaned by the politicians, and the public and the newspapers alike, but it is part of the texture of life in this particular version of this particular country. This fondness for industrial action will never change, just as prices will not stop rising, just as beer will remain warm and dark brown and tasting of the industrial processes that produce it. If the English have a common belief, it is a belief in certain kinds of inevitability.

Charlie Buck blows on his hands in an attempt to keep out the unseasonably cold weather. He has stood on the picket line in London's Gray's Inn Road for more than seven hours now. A coal brazier bums on the street, outside the entrance to the newspaper's offices.

His threshold for boredom, like that of most of his countrymen, is necessarily high, yet he finds himself all the same becoming restless, scoured by tedium. At the beginning, the strike - which is unusually protracted - had, in a strange way, been fun. It brings back to him his faint memory of the war. When that had started, no one had had any doubt that they would win in the end, and, even when danger had seemed imminent, it was often more monotonous than anything else, waiting out the time until the certain victory would arrive.

Victory was certain here, too. The management would cave in. They always did, they always had, they always would. Then Charlie and the rest would get back pay, and things would be the same as they were before.

He checks his watch. Time to go home. He gathers up his possessions - a white plastic shopping bag containing the remains of a sandwich packed by his wife, a Thermos of coffee and a book by Sidney Sheldon. He straightens up, then raises a hand towards the six or seven other strikers. There are mutters of farewell. Two hands are raised in return. One belongs to a tall, slightly stooped black man in his fifties, with grey beginning to penetrate the dark thickness of his hair. The hand is mutilated, has the index and middle fingers missing. The other belongs to a young man dressed in jeans smoking a roll-up cigarette. His overcoat is too large on him, has a herringbone pattern and displays signs of tattiness. Yet he wears an expensive watch, a Rolex.

See you, Snowball.
Bye, Charlie. You keep well, bwoy.
Mike.
Don't forget to vote. You've got till ten.
They're all the same, says Charlie.
What about the card game? says Snowball.
Charlie catches the man called Snowball's eye, throws him a look.
There's a card game? says Mike.
I've got to get off, says Charlie.

Charlie turns his back and begins to make his way towards the bus stop. Without looking round, he raises a hand in farewell.

What card game? says Mike. But Snowball has moved to another section of the picket.

Five miles to the east, in a small municipal park, Charlie's wife, Maureen, runs. He trajectory takes her away from the small council flat she lives in with Charlie and their son, Robert. She is dressed in a pale blue nylon track suit and white running shoes. Her lungs burn fiercely, her legs ache. Shortly, when she reaches the children's paddling pool that has been drained of water leaving only green scum, she will turn and begin the return journey. This is always the hardest moment for her, just before the homeward stretch, when there is more ahead of her than behind her and her whole body is complaining. But she is determined. She tightens her lips and narrows her eyes to focus on the paddling pool, which still seems impossibly distant. She listens to her breath harshly drawing, feels her breasts rise and fall with the rhythm of her footfalls.

She runs towards a young woman navigating a pushchair through a line of concrete bollards. In the pushchair, a toddler, a little girl, is kissing a pink rabbit. She looks up at Maureen and holds the rabbit out towards her as she approaches. Despite the increasing pain in her chest, Maureen smiles, lessens her pace slightly. The girl smiles back, then drops her rabbit in a puddle and begins to cry. Maureen stops, picks it up, wipes it off and hands it back.

Now Maureen begins to run once more. The paddling pool is closer. Seagulls perch on the climbing frame that is constructed ten yards to the right of the pool. She feels sputum in her throat, checks that no one is watching her, then hawks and spits carefully into a litterbin. The gobbet misses the interior of the container and hits the side. Maureen immediately stops, finds a paper handkerchief from her pocket and carefully wipes the tiny stain away, then drops the tissue into the bin.

She picks up pace again. The paddling pool grows larger. She wants to stop now, wants to rest on a bench, drink oxygen. But the magazine article she has read insists on a minimum of twenty minutes' aerobic exercise, four times a week. This is if it is to have the desired effect of increasing her metabolic rate and thus easily burning off the pounds. She is worried that her look and body are folding into the indiscriminate uniformity of middle age. She is thirty-eight years old, ten years younger than her husband.

She reaches the paddling pool, does a circuit of it, starts to head back. Her body hurts as much, but psychologically it is easier. She even ups her pace slightly. A woman she recognises as a neighbour approaches, pushing a shopping trolley.

Hello, Mrs Jackson.
Maureen. Here. Did you hear that -
Can't stop. Charlie's home in a minute. I've got to put his tea on the stove.
You be careful. You mind yourself.
I will.

She pushes on, checks her watch. Charlie will be back in an hour. He likes to have things just so. She needs to find a recipe for tonight. Robert complains that she is not adventurous enough.

She leaves the park and goes out into the street. A dog barks, worries her heels. She stops momentarily, at the same time anxious that any interruption of the activity will negate its effect. Nevertheless, she pats the dog, ruffles his coat. She is outside the greengrocer's.

That mutt is always making a nuisance of himself.
He's a nice dog, Frank. You should look after him.
He's a mutt. What you up to?
What's it look like?
I dunno. Running.
That's it.

She pushes off. Frank is a decent man, but he is sloppy with his weights, overcharges when he can get away with it. You have to watch people.

Her breath is coming in great gasps now, but she is deter-mined to sprint the last few hundred yards. Her breath rasps, her legs feel shaky. There's a bunch of kids hanging around the entrance to the estate as she approaches. They begin to laugh and jeer as Maureen comes into view. She stops to remonstrate but cannot find her breath. The kids run away, laughing. She knows where they live. Later, she'll have a gentle word with their parents.

Last few hundred yards now. She does not let up, checks her watch once more. Exactly twenty minutes. Mission accomplished. She slows to a walk. Robert is on the porch, smoking a cigarette. He is five ten, skinny, mussed-up red hair. Eighteen, but looks old. He smiles as she approaches.

Can't be good for you, he says to his mother.
At least I try, says Maureen.

I'll give you that, says Robert, drawing deeply on the cigarette. You have a go.

Charlie walks the few hundred yards to the bus stop and waits for the bus to take him home. After twenty-five minutes, a double-decker appears. By now there is a ten-yard queue, but the bus that arrives is completely full. It drives past without stopping. The queue shuffles disconsolately and a few words are muttered. Then it settles back down, as if a single animal, into disconsolate resignation. It is just the way things are. After fifteen more minutes, another bus appears on the horizon. This time he just makes it on, last but one. He leaves behind him a queue of twenty people. The bell sounds, the bus trembles and moves forward.

It is forty-minute ride to Fulham, where Charlie has lived for the last fifteen years of his life. London rolls past him as the bus progresses in fits and starts, engorging and disgorging its cargo at a dozen or so chilly bus stops, where long queues shuffle and mutter. He begins to enjoy the roll and sway of the old Routemaster, and although he gives up his seat to a woman holding a baby, he feels quite comfortable and has a good view through the window, which incomprehensibly, is clean whereas the remainder on the bus are too grimy to see through.